Windows Vista

An Update on Some Recent Posts

I wanted to take the opportunity to update you on a couple of my more recent blog posts.

First, as you may recall, I tried disabling virtual memory on my Data Protection Manager server in an effort to eliminate paging and the problems with inconsistent replicas that paging seems to cause. Since that time, all of the replicas of my protected volumes have remained in a consistent state.  The replicas for my Exchange storage groups became inconsistent after about a day, and my system state replicas became inconsistent about a day or two later.

Although I use multiple methods to back up my network, I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. I ended up replacing the system board in my DPM server tonight, and upgraded from 2 GB of RAM to 4 GB. I will keep you posted on what happens.

The other issue that I wanted to talk about was the problems that I am having with Windows 7 and the wireless NIC that’s built into my lab laptop. After doing some more research, I have discovered that the issue may be hardware related. I found a technical article that said that there is a bug in my laptop’s firmware and that because of the bug, you have to flash the BIOS before you will be able to install Windows Vista SP2. According to the article, the bug was directly related to the wireless NIC.

I went ahead and flashed the BIOS, and for kicks I installed Windows Vista with SP2. Unfortunately, I am now having the same issue with Vista that I was having with Windows 7. One thing that may possibly be causing the problem though is buggy drivers. I’m not positive, but I may have been running the 32-bit version of Vista when everything was working correctly. I was using the 64-bit version of Windows 7, and am currently using the 64-bit version of Vista. Unfortunately, I am going to need the machine for a project that I am working on for the next two months, so it will be August before I will be able to blow Windows off of the machine and test my theory.

Until then, I want to say thank you to Glen at Microsoft for his helpful suggestions.

The Windows Experience Index

When Microsoft first introduced Vista, one of the new features that was introduced along with it was the Windows Experience index. The basic idea was that the performance of various system components was rated and assigned a numerical score. The lowest score represented your overall Windows Experience Index.

At the time, Microsoft wanted to simplify things for home users by getting software publishers to list a minimum experience index rating for applications rather than firm hardware requirements. In other words, if an application required a minimum score of 2.0, and your computer was rated at 3.0, then you could be guaranteed that the application would work. Well, that was the theory anyway. Ultimately, I don’t know of any software publishers that actually began using the Windows Experience Index.

Although nobody really uses the Windows Experience Index to determine what applications they can perform, I do use it to test the effectiveness of hardware upgrades on my primary workstation. Tonight something interesting happened though. My computer previously had scores ranging from 5.0 to 5.9 and had an overall score of 5.0. I ended up replacing the system board, the CPU, the power supply, and the graphics card. This time when checked the Windows Experience Index, all of my scores were 5.9.

What I didn’t realize is that in Windows Vista, the scores are capped at 5.9. No matter how good your hardware is, you will never score higher than 5.9. This means that there will eventually come a time when the Windows Experience Index becomes meaningless as a benchmark because of improvements in hardware. Windows 7 also includes the Windows Experience Index, and the maximum score has been raised to 7.9. Even so, I have to question the effectiveness of the index if it is capped. Oh well, I guess that’s what the Performance Monitor is for.

Why Does Windows 7 Think it’s Vista?

For quite a while now we have known that the next Windows release is going to be Windows 7. The interesting thing is though, that Windows 7 will use an internal version number of 6.1. Actually, the version number is going to be longer than that, but we won’t know the full version number until Windows 7 goes RTM. In case you are wondering why I am even mentioning this, it is because Windows 6 is Vista.

You might initially assume that the reason why Windows 7’s version number makes it look like a Vista update is because Windows 7 was designed around the Windows Vista kernel. That’s not it though. According to my sources, the version number mimics Vista in an effort to avoid compatibility issues with applications that were designed to run on Vista.

Redirecting the Offline File Cache in Vista

A while back I had configured my laptop to cache my offline files to a secondary hard drive instead of using up space on my primary drive. When I had performed the initial setup, I wrote an article on how it’s done. That’s been a while though, and I can’t really remember who I wrote the article for, or even the exact registry key that I had to use to redirect the offline cache.

Over the weekend the hard drive in my laptop died, and I had to set up offline caching from scratch. I couldn’t find the article that I wrote on how to redirect the cache, but I did find a Microsoft Knowledgebase article on the subject at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937475

One thing that I will tell you about the technique that is outlined in the article is that you really do have to follow the steps in order. Offline caching is enabled by default in Vista, and you absolutely have to disable it and reboot the machine before you begin, or the technique in the KB article won’t work. After you reboot the system, it’s time to make the registry modification listed in the article. After doing so, you have to reboot again. Next, go ahead and enable offline caching, and reboot one more time.  Rebooting after each step is essential to the technique’s success.

When you are done, you can set Windows to show hidden files and folders. When you do, you should see a folder named CSC in the root directory of the designated hard drive. I recommend checking for the existence of this folder before you actually begin synchronizing your offline files, because if Windows has not created the folder, it means that you have done something wrong and the offline files are going to be cached onto your system drive.

Vista and malicious software

Although most people seem to think of Vista as being one of the worst mistakes that Microsoft has ever made, I have never made a secret of the fact that I prefer Vista over XP. My main reason for this is that Vista is a lot less suseptible to malware infections than XP is. I have lost count of the number of times that I have had to manually disinfect a particularly nasty malware infection on a Windows XP machine for friends, family, and clients. I’m not going to say that Vista is immune to malware infections, but to date, nobody has ever asked me to help them to disinfect their Vista machine. I know that the nay sayers will probably say that this is because more people run XP than Vista, but there is finally some hard data to back up what I have been saying all along.

The article at: http://blogs.pcmag.com/securitywatch/2009/04/malware_on_vista_rare_accordin.php shows the number of infections per 1000 machines that are running various operating systems. The rate of infection is far lower for Vista than it is for XP.

Windows Vista / Server 2008 SP2

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I was in Las Vegas at a conference all week. One thing about being gone like that is that E-mail tends to pile up while I’m away. It’s a long story (perhaps one for another blog post), but I usually don’t end up checking my E-mail while I am traveling.

At any rate, it’s Saturday night, and I just finished going through all of my messages from the past week. One of the messages that I missed while I was away was one from Microsoft annoiuncing that SP2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 had just been released. Microsoft decided to design the service pack so that it could be applied to either operating system, so you don’t have to download one version of the service pack for servers and another version for workstations. You can get the service pack through Windows Update, but there is also a standalone version that you can download at: https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?SiteID=691&DownloadID=17206&wa=wsignin1.0